See Chris Janson’s Personal New Video for “It Is Christmas”

Sure Thanksgiving is still two days away, but when Chris Janson drops a holiday song this perfectly traditional and sentimental, it’s officially time to deck the halls.

Janson is celebrating the release of his first-ever Christmas single “It Is Christmas,” a timeless ode to the most wonderful (and his favorite) time of the year.

“That’s all I’ve ever loved. I don’t love kitsch in anything, in any format of life but I love real and just things that make you feel something,” Janson told CMT.com.

“I’m very much a traditionalist person but I’m also a path cutter type person. And so, for years people have been saying, ’You should record a Christmas song, you should record a Christmas song.’ I don’t want to record a Christmas song. I don’t like doing other peoples’ music.”

So, he did what Janson does best–he wrote his own.

“One day I had a random idea to write a Christmas song in like July, and that’s what we did. I wrote this song probably three years ago with my co-writers and we just never thought it would see the light of day. I didn’t have a record deal at the time and then when I got one it was just something that I just sort of brought up in passing,” he said.

The track was actually recorded at the end of the session for his current album Everybody, but the idea of a Christmas song still wasn’t on everyone’s radar just yet. Finally, Janson said, it just made sense and the timing was perfect, as was the arrangement.

“When we wrote it I wanted a spoken word kind of thing, to me that’s what Christmas is,” he said. “Unless you can do it as good as Mariah Carey, I just don’t think you have any business doing it,” he jokingly said.

“If I’m going to do it, I want to … I just don’t want to follow the crowd. I have to write my own,” he asserted. “So we just wrote our own. It’s a true story by the way.”

Which is reflected in the cozy and heartwarming new music video featuring Janson’s wife Kelly Lynn, their children, and a host of friends and family, gathered around laughing and singing while Janson serenades everyone on the piano.

“I was crying the whole night. It was off-on crying, but I’m a sentimental person anyway and I love kids, and we had a bunch of kids of course. As you see in that video, those are all kids that I know and it was good. We enjoyed it. Thanks to my wife and my tour manager. Thanks to him, for taking off work and collaborating with my wife. They really … she just spear-headed everything and just honestly went to work. We shot the video one evening with one days’ preparation.”

And it’s one more perfect evening. “It Is Christmas” is now available.